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This is a follow-up to this post, with further excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker:

I’d only begun to work systematically on Jalnguy in the last few weeks in the field, and didn’t realize the full significance of it until I came to mull over the data back in London.
The many-to-one correspondence between Guwal [everyday language] and Jalnguy [“mother-in-law” language] vocabularies was a key to the semantic structure of Dyirbal. If one Jalnguy word was given as the equivalent for a number of distinct Guwal terms, it meant that the Guwal words were seen, by speakers of the language, to be related. For nouns, it revealed the botanical and zoological classifications which the Aborigines perceived. For instance, bayi marbu “louse”, bayi nunggan “larger louse”, bayi daynyjar “tick”, and bayi mindiliny “larger tick” were all grouped together under a single Jalnguy term, bayi dimaniny.

It could be even more revealing with verbs. The everyday style has four different words for kinds of spearing, and also such verbs as nyuban “poke a stick into the ground (testing for the presence of yams or snails, say)”, nyirran “poke something sharp into something (for example, poke a fork into meat to see if it is cooked)”, gidan “poke a stick into a hollow log, to dislodge a bandicoot”. All seven of these Guwal verbs are rendered by just one word in Jalnguy: nyirrindan “pierce”.

Sometimes Jalnguy grouped together verbs in a most surprising fashion. For instance, gundumman was given as Jalnguy equivalent of julman “squeeze, for example, squeeze a boil, knead flour”, and also of bugaman “chase, run down, as in catch a runaway steer”. What did these two verbs have in common? It was only when I had a chance to discuss it with Chloe that she explained gundumman means “bring together”. Hands come together in julman, while bugaman describes a pursuer coming into contact with what he is chasing…

[Dixon returns to North Queensland to do further work with Chloe.] I started going through all the nouns, verbs and adjectives in my accumulated vocabulary lists, asking how to say each one in the mother-in-law style. Bayi midin “ring-tail possum” was bayi jibuny in Jalnguy. Balan mawa “shrimp” came out as balan dunguy. The information given by Chloe, and later George, correlated well with what they had told me three years earlier. Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930, but it was clear that it was being remembered quite accurately…

Now it was time to get back to the serious business of gathering the Jalnguy words… Chloe decided she wanted some mates to help her think through some of the hardest words, so one day we went up to Murray Upper and assembled a sort of committee on Jalnguy, outside Jimmy Murray’s hut at Warrami… All sorts of things fell into place that day. For many verbs I’d originally been given a one-word English gloss. Nudin was “cut”, and so was gunban—and so was banyin—I was told. But they didn’t all have the same Jalnguy equivalent. Nudin and gunban were both jalnggan, but banyin was bubaman in Jalnguy; all the committee agreed on that.

Now bubaman I already knew as the correspondent of the everyday style verb baygun “shake or wave something, or bash something on something else, for example, pick up a goanna by its tail and bash its head on a tree to stun it.” The concept seemed to be “put something in motion, holding on to it” (and it might or might not impact on something else).

Further detail was needed. Nudin, I discovered, means “cut deeply, sever”, while gunban is “cut to medium depth, cut a piece out”. Fine, both are further specifications of the general Jalnguy verb jalnggan “cut”. Now for banyin. Every language has a few words like this, which describe an important everyday activity but which seem a bit bizarre to people from a different cultural background. Banyin means “get a stone tomahawk and bring it down on a rotten log so that the blade is embedded in the log, then pick up both tomahawk and log by the handle of the tomahawk and bash the log against a tree so that the log splits open and the ripe grubs inside it can be extracted and eaten”. It involves a tomahawk, which is the major implement for cutting or chopping. But the criterial action is seen to be the bashing of the log against a tree to split it; this can be inferred from the fact that the Jalnguy correspondent is bubaman “shake, wave or bash” rather than jalnggan “cut”.

The definition of banyin is the longest string of words expressing a single meaning I can remember ever seeing.

Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma ‘auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase’ and lemma ‘the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.’ Not particularly noteworthy in itself; what struck me was the etymologies: the former is from Greek lēmma (with long e) ‘thing taken, assumption,’ from lambanein ‘to take’ (compare the perfect passive eilēmmai), the latter from Greek lemma ‘husk,’ from lepein ‘to peel.’ Etymologically, they’re completely unrelated. Kind of neat.

It’s Gilbert Sorrentino day at wood s lot [01.25.2006]; I haven’t read much Sorrentino (Aberration of Starlight and, I think, Mulligan Stew), but I like his style. I very much like this interview by Alexander Laurence (from 1994). Asked about what’s happened since the glory days of Black Mountain, he says:

Hard to answer this question. I was on a panel a little while ago with Robert Creeley, and we were both being asked versions of your question. Apparently, young people are enormously interested in “how things were” in the Fifties. Creeley said something much to the point, to the effect that we all took art very seriously in those days, we were absolutely committed. He’s right, of course, there was a sense then among young artists that we were writing for our lives—but maybe more importantly, there was a really drab “establishment” in place at that time—artistic and social and political—and young artists felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were destroying it, “deforming the ideogram,” as Jakobson says.

And his response to a question about commercial publishing is a wonderful rant:

Joyce, Pound, and Williams commanded the smallest of audiences and were shunned by what we now think of as “major” publishing houses. Publishers have always been craven when the odds are not in their favor, it’s just enhanced nowadays because there is so much money to be made if the publisher can hit the shit machine. What is most surprising to me is the number of—what can I call them?—”absent” books published. These are books that have no literary merit, no spirit of aesthetic adventure, no rough but interesting formal design, and—this is most important—no chance of commercial success! That’s what is so amazing to me—not the number of Judith Krantz-like novels published, nor the Calvin Trillin-Garrison Keillor warm and wise and witty and wonderful malarkey, but the novels that just lie there: life and love in a small town in Northern California, sexual awakening in a Baptist family in Pennsylvania—daughter flees to Greenwich Village, meets bum who makes her pregnant, discovers feminism—and on and on. Were I running these houses, I’d can all these editors in a minute. If they can’t make millions, would be my thinking, I’ll be God damned if they’re going to put out excrement that will only break even, i.e., if we want to break even, I’d say, let’s publish BOOKS. But, of course, the chances are that the people who own these houses would not know a book if it buggered them.

And don’t miss his rave for my man Flann O’Brien.

This is another in a series of posts (1, 2) presenting excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker; this one deals with one of Dixon’s major interests, the avoidance forms common among Australian languages (you can see samples of so-called “mother-in-law language” here: scroll down to “2.3 Taboo and avoidance”). He introduces it on pp. 91ff:

Now that the rains had begun, we were keen to get back to Cairns before bad floods came; we had been warned that roads were often out for weeks at the height of the wet season. But Chloe insisted that before we left, we must go through one other type of language: Jalnguy. A special language that a man had to use when talking to—or even when talking in the presence of—his mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law would use it back. Jalnguy was also used between a woman and her father-in-law, and between certain types of cousins. Every member of the Jirrbalngan and Girramaygan tribes would know Jalnguy, and had to use it with relatives from these particular kin categories. They were people who should be kept at arm’s length in social dealings—one would not normally look them in the eye or be left alone with them without a chaperon—and the use of a special language, Jalnguy, was an overt index of this avoidance behavior.

There was never any choice involved, Chloe said. A man would talk with his wife in Guwal, the everyday language style, but if a mother-in-law was within hearing, he had immediately to switch to Jalnguy. All the texts and vocabulary I’d collected so far were Guwal. Some of the old people had warned Chloe that it wasn’t wise to divulge anything about Jalnguy, but she had decided to ignore them…

Everything, it appeared, had a different name in Jalnguy. “Water” was bana in the everyday style, Guwal, but jujama in Jirrbal Jalnguy. “Fire” was buni in straight-out Jirrbal but yibay in Jirrbal Jalnguy. “Man” was yara in Guwal and bayabay in Jalnguy, while “woman” was jugumbil and jayanmi respectively.

It appeared, though, that the grammar was the same—only the nouns, verbs, and adjectives differed…

We went through a few score words, getting Jalnguy equivalents… Then Chloe said that we needed some conversation in Jalnguy. It was always easier if she had a mate to talk to. We should go down to the mission, and once more enlist the aid of old Rosie Runaway.

It appeared that Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930. The gradual loosening of tribal bonds and the pressure of learning English as a second language may have been partly responsible. Since then Guwal had been used for everything, even when an avoidance relation was around. The traditional taboo relationships were still respected—a son-in-law would never look his mother-in-law in the eye, and he would talk softly in her presence, avoiding risqué subjects. But Jalnguy was no longer employed as a linguistic marker of these social attitudes.

In fact, only a few of the older people remembered much of the Jalnguy vocabulary. Rosie did, and although she and Chloe were not in a taboo relationship they were soon rattling on in a conversation that reconstructed old times. Walking in the bush, getting hot and sweaty and going for a bathe in the cool water of a nearby creek. Plaiting split lawyer vine into a dilly-bag. Then both ladies bewailed, in Jalnguy, the fact that they were the last ones who could speak it—children nowadays go to school and all they learn is how to speak English.

Every single vocabulary word was from Jalnguy—not once did either Chloe or Jarrmay [Rosie’s real name] lapse into Guwal. Later on we went back to Chloe’s and she translated the text, phrase-by-phrase, into Jirrbal Guwal and also into Girramay Guwal.

Jalnguy was a revelation. I’d never heard of anything like this before, in Australia or anywhere else. Every member of the tribe had to know two distinct languages—or at least, two distinct vocabularies, for the phonetics and grammar were the same. Two names for every animal, two forms for every verb, two varieties of each adjective. But it was also something of an embarrassment. I felt I had quite enough to do, over the coming wet season, trying to work out the structure of Guwal. I decided to concentrate on the everyday style first, try to learn to speak it and fully understand it. Further study of Jalnguy should be postponed until that object had been achieved.

We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York Times, I now find myself in the acutely uncomfortable position of defending him against his own copyeditors, who, according to Sunday’s column, not only exist but challenge him on mistaken grounds:

These thoughts are triggered by the copy desk’s (two words) objection to the spelling of a word in last week’s column, which dealt with irregardless as a jocular redundancy and therefore, in my judgment, “arrant nonsense.” Last year, I chose that very phrase as an example of “wedded words,” like unmitigated gall, congenital liar and blithering idiot.[…]

As a language columnist, I have a license to use almost any taboo word or misspelling as an object of study, but not as part of my own prose. The objection was not to its being a word-wedding, cliché or fixed phrase, but because the desk held that arrant should be spelled errant. You could look it up, it (the desk) said, in the Dodger and Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s classic phrase.

I looked it up, in Webster’s New World, and in Merriam-Webster’s, and in American Heritage, and cannot fault the desk: there it was in all three of the best sellers: “arrant, adjective, variant of errant.” That was the lexicographers’ way of saying that although some spelling deviants insisted on arrant with a beginning a, most sensible people agreed with the establishment and spelled errant with an e. The Times’s copy desk was going by the book.

Safire is unquestionably right; as he says, “We are not dealing here with one word with one meaning spelled two different ways, one preferred and one variant; in my view, we are dealing with a word whose meaning has split, and the resulting ‘variation’ in spelling signifies the difference in the two meanings.” If indeed the copyeditors wanted him to make the change (and I can’t suppress a small voice that suggests he might be making the whole exchange up as an excuse to discuss the two words), they were not only wrong but a disgrace to their (and my) profession.

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In the course of editing a medical article I came across the phrase in silico, which at first mystified me; fortunately, Wikipedia has an admirably thorough entry that not only defines it—”performed on computer or via computer simulation”—but discusses the propriety of the word-formation:

Contrary to widespread belief, in silico does not mean anything in Latin… “In silico” was briefly challenged by “in silicio”, which is correct Latin for in silicon (the Latin term for silicon, silicium, was created at the beginning of the 19th century by Berzelius). “In silico” was perceived as catchier, possibly through similarity to the word silicate. “In silico” is now almost universal; it even occurs in a journal title (In Silico Biology: http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/)

The Wikipedia article also provides a citation for the first use: “Using the data available in libraries […] two sets of experiments were performed on computers (experiments in silico) using the consistency of the data extracted.” (Danchin A, Medigue C, Gascuel O, Soldano H, Henaut A. From data banks to data bases. Res Microbiol. 1991 Sep-Oct;142(7-8):913-6.) I trust it will show up in the OED in due time. (Although generally I prefer that words be properly formed, I have to agree that in silico is preferable to the longer form, and hell, silicium isn’t classical anyway.)

Mark Liberman has a Language Log post about an oddly formed adjective that’s always pleased and puzzled me, Shanghainese. Where does that intrusive –n– come from? I assumed it had something to do with Chinese, but Mark provides more parallels:

But my guess is that this starts with the analogical shadow cast by the place names ending in ‘n’—Japan, Taiwan, Canton, Bhutan—whose adjectival forms (and the corresponding language names and/or ethnonyms) add ‘-ese’—Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Bhutanese. Then there are the cases where a final syllable is elided in the place names to get adjectival forms that happen to end up ending in ‘-nese’: Chinese, Lebanese.
Finally—and most relevantly—there are some long-established cases where there is an intrusive ‘n’: Java → Javanese, Sunda → Sundanese, Bali → Balinese, etc. The oldest of these seems to be Javanese, which the OED traces back to 1704[…] and which may derive from an earlier Javan…
The preference for -ese as the adjectival ending for places in the “East Indies” presumably reflects the influence of Dutch, which also (I think) regularly has intrusive –n– in such words: Javanees, Sundanees, Balinees, etc. I don’t have access to a historical dictionary of Dutch—is there one?—but I assume that these words date back at least to the early 17th century, if not the 16th. I also don’t know whether the use of intrusive –n– to repair hiatus is the general pattern in Dutch, or whether (as in English) it’s just one of many quasi-regular local options.

He expressed surprise that the OED’s earliest citation for the word Vietnamese is from 1947; I reminded him (via e-mail, LL having no comments) that “until WWII and Ho’s independence movement, there was no such thing as Vietnam—what we think of as Vietnam was three provinces of French Indochina, and you’d use Tonkinese, Annamese/Annamite (interesting that there was no settled form), or Cochin-Chinese as called for.” And I added the following observation, which I repeat here as perhaps of interest to such of my readers as are interested in recondite geographical terminology:

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From Sturrock’s translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe:

I addressed these words to Francoise: “You’re an excellent person,” I said smarmily, “you’re kind, you’ve a thousand good qualities, but you’re no further on than the day you arrived in Paris, either in knowing about women’s clothes or in how to pronounce words properly and not commit howlers.” This was a particularly stupid criticism, because the French words we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only “howlers” made by Gallic mouths in mispronouncing Latin or Saxon, our language being simply the defective pronunciation of a few others. The genius of the language in its living state, the future and past of French, that is what should have interested me in Francoise’s mistakes. Was her “amender” for “mender” not equally curious as those animals surviving from remote epochs, such as the whale or the giraffe, which demonstrate to ust the stages through which animal life has passed.

The original:

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I just ran across a fine old slang word, spifflicate or spiflicate—the former spelling is preferred by the New Oxford American Dictionary, which defines it as ‘treat roughly or severely; destroy,’ the latter by the OED, which defines it more elaborately: “To deal with in such a way as to confound or overcome completely; to treat or handle roughly or severely; to crush, destroy.” Some OED citations:

1796 New Brighton Guide 39 Come, spiflicate that scoundrel Care, Gruel him, bruise him, never fear.
1818 MOORE Fudge Fam. Paris ix. 223 Alas, alas, our ruin’s fated; All done up, and spiflicated!
1842 BARHAM Ingol. Leg. Ser. II. Babes in Wood xi, So out with your whinger at once, and scrag Jane, while I spiflicate Johnny!
1873 Brit. Q. Rev. LVII. 276 The way in which the learned, racy old Hector smashes and spiflicates scientific idiots.. is delicious.

The participle occurs in this bit of dialogue, which I shall have to remember for future use:

1891 MEREDITH One of our Conquerors x, You’ve got a spiflicating style of talk about you.

The etymology? It’s a “fanciful formation.”

Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat posts infrequently, but it’s always worth reading. Last month I meant to blog his post comparing the traditional (but probably erroneous) etymology of Istanbul < Greek εις την Πόλιν, pronounced /istimbóli(n)/ and meaning 'to the City,' with

‘usquuf, “bishop” in Arabic, which apparently derives from a Coptic reinterpretation of Greek episkopos “bishop” as e-pi-skopos “to the skopos“, due to which skopos was reanalyzed as meaning “bishop”.

I am unqualified to judge the validity of the latter etymology, but it’s certainly interesting.
And this month he has a post about one of the easternmost outposts of Berber, El-Fogaha (الفقهة) in central Libya, where some archaic Berber words are retained and there are some interesting phonological developments.

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